Date of Award
11-2023
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts - History
Department
History
First Advisor
Perky Beisel
Second Advisor
Scott Sosebee
Third Advisor
Dana Cooper
Fourth Advisor
Linda Reynolds
Abstract
Kay Bailey Hutchison served Texas and the United States in many capacities during her political career. She vastly impacted Texas, as well as Nacogdoches, Texas in particular, through her time serving as a member of the Texas House of Representatives and as a United States Senator. In 2012, she donated her massive collection of gifts and memorabilia to the East Texas Research Center, a regional archive at Stephen F. Austin State University. The university honored her donation by creating a room to display the collection and interpret her influence on East Texas. Due to a rushed timeline, administrative interference, and insufficient knowledge of artifact stewardship, those working on the project disregarded museological best practices and put historical resources at risk. This public history thesis provides an updated history of Hutchison’s political career and creates a narrative of the Kay Bailey Hutchison Project and how things went awry. The author analyzes the museological best practices utilized to reprocess the collection, discusses how to adapt those practices in an archival setting, and reflects on her efforts to reprocess the Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison Collection.
Repository Citation
Hendry, Kollynn, "The Politics of Preservation: Stewarding Artifacts in Archives" (2023). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 521.
https://scholarworks.sfasu.edu/etds/521
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
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